Selene- Greek TitanTitan"The Far-Gleaming"

The Silver Chariot

After bathing her body in the waters of Ocean, Selene rose into the night. The Homeric Hymn describes the moment: she donned her far-gleaming robes, and from her golden crown a radiance shone that embraced the earth. Her strong-necked horses drew the silver chariot west while the dark world below turned bright.

She was a daughter of Hyperion and Theia, born into the first generation of celestial gods. Her brother Helios drove the sun's golden chariot by day. Her sister Eos drew back the dark at each dawn. Selene crossed the sky last, in silver. Hesiod names all three in the Theogony among the children of light. In the Works and Days, he counts the days of the month by her phases: some favorable for sowing, others best avoided entirely. Farmers and sailors set their calendars by her face.

Artists sometimes showed Selene riding not horses but a pair of white bulls, their crescent horns echoing the moon on her brow. When Zeus overthrew Kronos and hurled the Titans into Tartarus, Selene was spared. The moon had to rise. She continued her nightly course under the Olympians as she had under the Titans, older than the gods she now served.

The Love of Endymion

Mount Latmus rises above the coast of Caria, its wooded slopes climbing to bare stone. One night Selene's light fell on the mountain, and she saw a young shepherd asleep among his flocks. His name was Endymion. She left her chariot and lay beside him on the mountainside.

Night after night she returned. But Endymion was mortal. He would age and die while she rose every evening unchanged. Apollodorus records that Zeus offered Endymion any gift he wished. The shepherd chose eternal sleep: youth without end, but no waking. His eyes closed on Mount Latmus and never opened again.

He sleeps still in a cave on the mountain, his face unchanged since the night Selene first found him. She never stopped visiting. Every night her chariot pauses over Caria, and moonlight reaches through the cave's entrance to where the shepherd lies. From her visits Selene bore Endymion fifty daughters. By Zeus she bore another child: Pandia, whose name means "the all-bright." The Athenians honored Pandia with her own festival, held on the day after the City Dionysia. After three days of theatrical performance under Dionysus's patronage, the city turned to the full moon's daughter.

Pausanias describes a cave at Heracleia on Mount Latmus where locals honored Endymion's eternal sleep. The site drew pilgrims well into the Roman period. The cave was real. The moonlight that entered it was real. Whether the shepherd inside stirred, no visitor could say.

The White Fleece

Pan desired Selene, but he knew his shape would repel her: the goat-legs, the horns. He wrapped himself in a fleece of white wool and waited in the Arcadian woods until the moon descended. Selene saw only something pale and soft in the clearing. She came close. Virgil tells the story in the Georgics.

Drawing Down the Moon

Thessalian witches were famous for their power to "draw down the moon," to pull Selene from her path for their enchantments. Aristophanes mocks the claim in the Clouds: a debtor proposes buying a Thessalian witch to trap the moon in a box, so the month never ends and his debts never come due. The joke depends on the audience believing the feat was at least rumored to be possible.

In Theocritus's second Idyll, a woman named Simaetha works a love spell by moonlight. She turns a bronze wheel, the iynx, and chants over smoldering barley while the full moon hangs above her. Between each verse she commands the wheel: "Iynx, draw that man to my house." She burns laurel. She melts wax. Each ingredient is meant to bend the will of the man she wants, and Selene overhead is her silent accomplice.

The Greek Magical Papyri preserve dozens of rituals addressed to Selene by name. Practitioners burned incense under the full moon and called the goddess down to charge their spells, with precise instructions on which herbs to burn and which words to speak. The full moon was the preferred hour. All other light was unwelcome.

Eclipses and Dread

When the moon's face darkened and reddened in eclipse, the familiar silver turned the color of old bronze. The Greeks believed witches had pulled Selene from the sky or that some force was assaulting the goddess. Citizens ran into the streets with bronze vessels, beating metal and shouting to drive away whatever afflicted her. Plutarch describes the custom. The noise was meant to reach the sky.

Before the Battle of Pydna in 168 BCE, a lunar eclipse threw the Roman camp into confusion. The tribune Sulpicius Gallus had predicted it, but the soldiers still raised torches toward the darkened moon and beat bronze together until the shadow passed. Selene's light returned. The battle came the next day, and the Romans won.